


Climbing Uphill

by bookishandbossy



Series: the next four years (college au) [2]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: College AU, F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-30
Updated: 2014-11-30
Packaged: 2018-02-27 13:47:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2695259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fitzsimmons study for finals.  Or, Jemma has a plan and Fitz is terrified.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Climbing Uphill

They were sitting in the same booth at the diner, plates and glasses strewn across the table, and Jemma had an action plan and Fitz was terrified. She pulled out a stack of textbooks, a pile of bulging notebooks, two new packs of highlighters, pencils, pens... “How did you manage to fit everything in there?” he blurted out. “I think that you're done and then you pull out something else. It's just like Hermione's beaded bag.”

“I'm not Hermione, Fitz. We've had this discussion before and although I do admire her intelligence and skills in preparation, I really think that her taste in romantic inter—you're trying to distract me again, aren't you?” She glared at him, and he was more terrified. “I have an action plan for finals week and we need to get through it tonight.”

“Midterms went fine,” he shrugged, eying her onion rings from across the table. Jemma's food always looked better than his, probably because he ate his in five seconds flat. 

“We spent the night before midterms locked in the library, drinking unhealthy amounts of coffee, and panicking when we thought that those creaking and clanking noises were an angry ghost. That's not happening again,” Jemma said firmly and flipped open her notebook to reveal a color-coded calendar. She'd mapped out all of their finals and projects, using reds and yellows and oranges for him and cooler blues and greens for her, and calculated how early they'd need to start studying for each one.

“Midterms were fun,” Fitz grinned at her. Jemma had jumped about half a foot in the air when they heard the creaking, and he hadn't stopped teasing her about it since. He was about to describe how she'd sent both of their cups of coffee flying across the room when she snatched her onion rings out of his reach and he slumped back against the booth, sulking. The message was clear: obey Jemma's studying rules, or the food stopped. “All right, give me the calendar,” he sighed and reached for his mechanical engineering textbook.

They worked in silence for the next few hours, cross-referencing their notes for each class with the textbooks and switching subjects every time the alarm on Jemma's phone went off. She hummed to herself as she worked, head happily bent over her books and curls spilling across the pages of another of her yellow legal pads. Somewhere in the first hour, he started noticing the way that the light caught in the million shades of brown that made up her hair and the way that she chewed on the end of her pen while she flipped through a textbook and—He groaned and planted his face in his notes. When they'd first met, he'd thought that maybe they could be _something_. But then Jemma had been asked out by a long line of well muscled guys with symmetrical faces and low body fat percentages, who she'd definitely never seen shriek like a little girl at the sight of a spider, and he'd decided to firmly put her in the best friend category in his head. The category where he didn't go on long rambling tangents about the perfect geometry of Jemma Simmons and fantasize about getting to calculate each of her angles firsthand. “Fitz? Are you all right?” she asked, looking up from her lab results.

“Just hungry,” he mumbled. “Can we get more food?” She rolled her eyes but after he reminded her that it was all going on her parents' credit card, they ordered pie. Apple and pumpkin for him, blueberry for her. He'd had his first experience with American Thanksgiving over break, when one of their professors had taken pity on both of them, stranded in the dorms for five days, and invited them over for dinner, and he'd decided soon after to try to replicate the experience whenever he could. Later, Jemma had told him that she'd thought he was about to burst and he'd stuck his tongue out at her, like they were both five again. Really, when he thought about it, it made perfect sense that nothing had happened between them.

Halfway through the pumpkin pie, he had an irresistible urge to tug on one of her curls, if only so she'd stop frowning down at her phone, and at the text from another of her muscly dates, and pay attention to him. So he did, and she squeaked and whirled to face him, close enough that they were nose to nose. “Leopold Fitz,” she hissed. “What did you do that for?”

“I, um,” Fitz couldn't very well say his opinion of her current...boy thing. Connor-Kyle-Reese—whatever his name was, complete with chiseled cheekbones and dumb enough that Fitz had once successfully convinced him that hydrogen dioxide (also known as water) was a dangerous compound. He had the feeling that if he told her that his mother would say that Connor-Kyle-Reese wasn't the brightest bulb on the chandelier, he'd have a firsthand experience with some of the volatile substances Jemma was keeping in her room. Luckily, he glanced over at his phone and saw a text from Skye, who had adopted him almost as soon as he became friends with Jemma. “Skye texted. They're doing sing-along _Sound of Music_ tonight at the Cameo and she thought that we might want to go with her.” 

Jemma nearly bounced out of the booth—it had been her favorite movie as a child and she had insisted on being a Von Trapp for five Halloweens straight—before she glanced down at her books and remembered her study plan. “Well, we'll just tell Skye that we're busy,” she said with a sigh of resignation and uncapped her highlighter. “The study plan does not account for spontaneous _Sound of Music_ sing-alongs.”

“We could always make it up tomorrow,” he offered. “I'll even buy the popcorn.” She ignored him, but he recognized how she sank her teeth into her lower lip to keep herself from saying anything. “ _Jemma_ ,” he sang. “How do you solve a problem like Jemma?”

“I know what you're doing.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “It's not going to get you out of studying.”

“It's not that,” he blurted out. “I actually think that the Von Trapps are bloody annoying. But you love the movie and I know that you want to go, and you look exhausted all the time even though you could ace all your classes with your eyes closed, and I think that you deserve to spend a night singing along horribly off-key to your favorite movie and being happy. If that would make you happy?”

“I think it would,” she said slowly, smiling and putting her highlighter down with a decisive thunk. “And I do not sing off-key.”

“Yeah, you do. But I like you anyway.” It slipped out before he could think better of saying it, and he quickly scrambled to cover his tracks, fumbling around to sweep his books into his bag. “Come on, or all the good seats will be gone when we get there.”

“I like you anyway too.” Jemma grinned at him. “I think you might have even ascended to best friend status. Be careful, or I'll buy us friendship bracelets for Christmas.”

“Oh God, not the friendship bracelets. Please, spare me,” he groaned. Really, though, he wouldn't mind. Fitz was coming to realize that he'd follow Jemma Simmons anywhere. Even to a Sound of Music sing along where she warbled along to “Climb Every Mountain” at an alarmingly high pitch, got popcorn stuck in his hair, stole his Reese's Pieces, and fell asleep on his couch at two in the morning after splitting two bottles of cheap white wine with Skye afterward. 

Because really, though, asleep on his couch at two in the morning, she looked like she belonged there.


End file.
